I find Gentoo a very good idea on my elderly Thinkpad, since I can set it up
to do exactly what's needed, without a lot of superfluous stuff. I've had no
problems with any drivers (including wireless) but the hardware is pretty old,
and pretty common, so drivers are well-used and debugged.

The only question I'd have on your hardware is the Nvidia drivers; people
complain about them, but I don't know the exact state of current play.

The only thing I know is that ati drivers for the newer models are awful with compiz.... I havn't had any problems with my nvidia drivers, but if compiz has problems with both ati and nvidia, there's really nothing much left to choose from, except maybe to ditch compiz, which would throw the visual experience you get back to 2003 standards...

Actually X61s come with an included docking station, which has the CD/DVD burner. The docking station also has the parallel printer port and a DB-9 serial port. My X61 had a T8100 Duo in it, means full Xen virtualization and 64 bit._________________Being a Gentoo user means living in a house inhabited by a family of crazed carpenters. When you wake up, the house is different. Maybe there is a new turret, or some walls have moved, or perhaps someone has removed the floor under your bed.

Have you guys heard of clevo or compal laptops? They sell laptop barebones, which you can build yourself. I have one myself and Gentoo works great on it. I bought this barebone without wifi and bluetooth modules, and I don't know if it work, but I think it will.
They have many resellers in the US and Europe, like sager, rjtech, alienware, voodoo.
rjtech have really good prices. http://rjtech.com/

i recommend you build a custom laptop.
maybe from power notebooks?
i have a compal fl-90, and its great, plus when you build ur laptop you get to choose what you have inside(to some degree anyways ^^).
in my case i got core2duo, gforce 8600m gt, 2gb btooth, the new wifi card, all the figures.
and gentoo works on like perfectly.
the only thing i havent tested so far, fully, is bluetooth. but it is recognized so it should be working.

once you start buying custom, you realize how regular companies overprice their laptops by far...

there are other sources then powernotebooks btw. maybe even locally, in your city there might be such a shop, that builds laptops.
now a days they are just as simple as computers to build, you can even change/upgrade you video cards afterward, if its nvidia anyway(dont think radeon has that yet).(before you could only upgrade the usual stuff, like hd, ram, etc...)

I am a relatively new Linux user. I have been playing and tweaking with Fedora for about a year now. I started becoming much more interested in Linux while working with it at work. I took some Linux classes that my job offered for free. So for a year I have Fedora on my desktop and been taking various courses like Linux device drivers, Linux administration, Shell/awk programming, etc. and I just adore it all. I don't know why I stuck with Win-doze for so long. I have heard some interesting things about Gentoo, particularly from a friend of mine who is a Gentoo addict apparently. I figured I would give it a shot. Recently, I have decided that the laptop I do have is just total crap now and need something new. It's just too old and I think the hardware is just about giving up. So now I get to have the fun of picking out a new laptop. I want something powerful and something that will run real well with Linux on it.

Now my research so far indicates to me that there are OEM's (Original Equipment Manufacturers) that will sell their hardware to companies like Dell, etc. Dell and such will almost always install Win-blows on their hardware. They will then claim that they support Linux, but what they really do is wipe out Windows and replace it with whatever flavor of Linux. So the various articles I read mentioned to try and grab a laptop from one of these OEM's.

Maybe it doesn't matter too much what the hardware itself is. I will claim complete ignorance on this subject and seek some help on this matter. Any recommendations? What has worked real well? What matters? What doesn't?

Moved from Installing Gentoo to Gentoo Chat as this isn't a direct support question._________________“Truth, like infinity, is to be forever approached but never reached.” --Jean Ayres (1972)
---avatar cropped from =AimanStudio---

If you're looking for a good laptop for running Linux, I recommend this website: http://www.linux-laptop.net/
Click on the brand of laptop you think you want and read some of the entries. You'll probably find one or several that are specifically about running Gentoo on a specific model.

I'm not sure, but I think you will be able to find some fairly new models at that website. If nothing else, you'll get a feel for which devices/drivers work better than others. For example, I checked out that site before buying a used Thinkpad T42 for school. I went with this model because it has intel wireless (ipw2200) which I found out runs very well under Linux without a lot of fudging. I don't have to mess around with madwifi or any of that. The T42 is a fairly old model, but it runs Gentoo like a champ.

The hardware does matter. You should definitely check out what cards, chipsets, or devices are available in the laptop you think you want, and read up about the state of the drivers and the experiences of others who have already been there and done that. The biggest thing to look out for is the wireless support. That's the major thing you want to be sure to get right. Everything else is fairly well-supported across the board; but always check to make sure.

That's all. Enjoy.

PS- Welcome to Gentoo. Your friend is an addict, huh? Be careful... it will probably happen to you, too.

I don't have a particular answer to "what laptop to get", but I'd like to share some advice on what to do with your laptop, once you get it.

The main thing that distinguishes Gentoo from other linux distributions (and other operating systems for that matter) is how incredibly busy it can keep the machine during install and updates, because of all the compilation.

Many laptops aren't really designed to be that busy that long. They'll do it, but they can get very hot in the process. So keep an eye on that as you become familiar with it.

You'll probably want to use a external fan blowing at it (usually in the back). If you get a dual core, the various manuals suggest setting MAKEOPTS to "-j3" in /etc/make.conf to run extra concurrent jobs and use the cores better. But since it is a laptop, you might want to stay at "-j1" if you need help keeping the temperatures down. It'll take longer to compile but it'll run cooler. Try it in different ways to see which one works best for you, or maybe what I'm saying hopefully won't be a problem for you.

Also, if your laptop has a lithium battery, you can make choices in how you use it that can greatly extend the battery's service life.

Ideally you want to keep the battery cool, and at around 40-60% charge. The reason is a fully-charged battery degrades faster. A hot battery also degrades faster. A hot fully-charged battery degrades faster still. [reference]

Unfortunately, when compiling, the laptop (and the battery) is hot. And it is usually kept plugged in since it takes a long time, so the battery will also be fully charged. That's the worst possible combination for the battery's service life. If the laptop can work on the charger and without the battery, pulling the battery out while compiling can help -- but then you run the risk of data loss if there's a power failure. If you have a UPS that you can plug the laptop into when running without battery, that's the best. Or you might want to compile on battery and periodically plug the charger in to keep it around 50% charge.

Anyway, those are some thoughts from using Gentoo on my laptop. I'm happy to report its lithium battery still has very good charge capacity after 2.5 years.

...
Many laptops aren't really designed to be that busy that long. They'll do it, but they can get very hot in the process. So keep an eye on that as you become familiar with it.

Imho this is nonsense. If a laptop can't "take the heat", then I consider it crap and you should buy a proper one that can. My Lenovo N200 (which can hardly be considered high quality or high-end) with a C2D 1.8G goes up to 60-65 Celsius when on 100%, still, apart from the fan blowing it is still slightly warm to the touch. The only slightly hotter area is above the CPU and the fan (top left).

I have C2D 2.2Ghz laptop and it's working 24/7 I compile a lot of stuff on it. It gets hot sometimes, but It's completely normal for laptop. I never heard/have laptop brake from overheating. Mine is at 60-70 celsius degree all the time. When gaming it get's to 80 sometimes , but that's just fine with laptops. As for Video Card I have 8600gt, which overheats a lot compared to it's "desktop version". Now it's at 68 celsius degrees, when on desktop it's always between 45-50 celsius and that's completely normal, because It has semi passive cooling. Recent laptops have build-in overheating control mechanism in bios-if it gets too hot, bois underclocks CPU and GPU automatically or shut's down. I had many laptops run gentoo, inluding OEM and ODM versions and never had any problem with drivers or anything else... Wireless drivers is not not problem aswell as a matter of fact everthing worked out perfectly "out of the box" for me, but you can Install Winblowz drivers with ndiswrapper if you want to. I even have battery coservative module in kernel, called "smart battery" wich keeps my 9 cell battery at 50% charge all the time and it's quite cool. Laptos are definetely hotter that desktops, that's true and you should always control you tempsm if you don't want to brick you lappy. If you think it's too hotm than buy some Zalman laptop cooler, which costs around 50$ it will help cool down 10-20 celsius, but I don't think it's necessary, if you aint got some crazy DUAL GTX video card gaming rig you don't need it then. Just remember to clean your laptop every 3-4 month b/c it gets much dust in it accumulated.
It doesn't matter which brand or hardware you buy. Generally they all buy from same manufacturers like, Quanta, Clevo, A-Open, Compal, MSI. So it doesn't matter. But if you buy from ODM you will get it cheaper and quality, build quality and support quality is much, much higher than in Famous brands like...Dell, HP etc....
Usians can buy 1200$ really nice laptops, it will not be beast but which nice configs.
In europe it little more expensive. It starts from 1500$, for arund 2000$ you can get decent fancy laptop

I did notice the T61 series have an Nvidia chipset available now, so graphics tweaking should be simpler that what we had to do.

What wishful thinking! Try getting reliable hibernation! Or even good 2D performance!

My comment was with regard to compositing. And, afaik, intel video chipsets are the only 'stable' variety that hibernation plays nice with. Also kindly note that my post was pre- Nvidia chipset snafu.

Presently, Intel is the ONLY video chipset vendor I 'trust' when it comes to open source video drivers and reliability. Nvidia lost me the beginning of 08, and ATI, though they are getting better, still have a way to go before I make an investment towards them.

I did notice the T61 series have an Nvidia chipset available now, so graphics tweaking should be simpler that what we had to do.

What wishful thinking! Try getting reliable hibernation! Or even good 2D performance!

My comment was with regard to compositing. And, afaik, intel video chipsets are the only 'stable' variety that hibernation plays nice with. Also kindly note that my post was pre- Nvidia chipset snafu.

Presently, Intel is the ONLY video chipset vendor I 'trust' when it comes to open source video drivers and reliability. Nvidia lost me the beginning of 08, and ATI, though they are getting better, still have a way to go before I make an investment towards them.

Sorry, I hadn't noticed the date. I had bought a T61 with the nvidia graphics chip, with the impression that everything will run really nice and I can get good 3D performance when needed. The performance of the nvidia drivers was a very big disappointment,- the performance still is a disappointment even after more than a year. _________________emerge --quiet redefined | E17 vids: I, II | Now using e from git | e18, e19, and kde4 sucks :-/

You'll probably want to use a external fan blowing at it (usually in the back).

It reduces the temperature by 4 degrees C in my experience. This of course only works if you have a bottom fan - IBMs and some other laptops have a side blowing fan so that they can actually be used on laps without the fabric obstructing air flow.

Akkara wrote:

If you get a dual core, the various manuals suggest setting MAKEOPTS to "-j3" in /etc/make.conf to run extra concurrent jobs and use the cores better. But since it is a laptop, you might want to stay at "-j1" if you need help keeping the temperatures down. It'll take longer to compile but it'll run cooler.

But that would affect overall performance. You could force the cpu frequency governor to an appropriate lower value using cpufreqd.

Akkara wrote:

Also, if your laptop has a lithium battery, you can make choices in how you use it that can greatly extend the battery's service life.

The lesser number of times you use the battery, actually, the longer the life. Batteries are reliably rated by the number of charge-discharge cycles they can last. My Dell D610, for example, is rated for 500 times. So keeping your laptop plugged in the the surest way to get the most battery life. There is no downside to not using lithium batteries. Unlike Ni-MH you don't have to drain them every month for them to retain their full charge._________________Gentoo is the stick-shift of Linux.
You work it manually, it has somewhat better performance, but it's really for the fun of it.

I'm trying to save me from a lot of googling assuming that someone else has confronted the same problem recently i.e. I am buying two laptops for my personal usage. The first laptop should be a small ultra-portable and the second a "real" portable. I am looking for something where every part would be fully supported by a vanilla kernel and price range would be undefined for the first and maybe 1500€ for the second. One of the reasons for this is that I want to use only open source drivers, so that there's a reasonably probability that any possible problems with suspend would be fixed. The second laptop must also have virtualization extensions in the CPU. The first should probably not have an SSD drive, because my main use for it is to take it with me on trips without having to carry any books with me (i.e. I always scan all my technical books into djvu format and keep them on the laptop) and these take quite a few GB of space.

I previously have a MacBook Pro, but I would like something as robust with more disk space and a better battery. The new MacBook has pretty much the specs that I need, but I don't want to pay the Mac tax for the "coolness". I also want to change the battery, as currently my batteries have lasted for less than a year. A plus would be a possibility to not be forced to pay for windows.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

EDIT: I might add that I am living 50% in London 50% in continental Europe. I have never bought a computer in the UK, so any recommendations of cheap and reliable stores is welcome. I am assuming that the cheap pound might have some affect on bigger brand computers that usually have a fixed price until a newer model comes out.

Thinkpads are nice from what I've read about them, but they're really fucking ugly. There is a wiki for linux Thinkpad's here, apparently they're supposed to run pretty good with linux on them, and have good linux hardware support._________________Ludwig von Mises Institute

Quote:

I am not to be a shepherd, I am not to be a grave-digger. No longer will I speak to the people; for the last time I have spoken to the dead.

Does anyone know about Sony Vaios and Fujitsu's Lifebook P-series laptops? Basically I would like to have something with Intel wifi and graphics and a good ACPI implementation. I really don't care about any other functionality (i.e. fingerprint readers and similar stuff). There seems to be a million models of these, so I wonder which ones have vanilla kernel supported core components? Does anyone have any of the newer models?

How about the Acer Aspire One notebooks. Do they have vanilla kernel supported components? I googled dmesg outputs for these and some NetBSD dmesg seemed to have Atheros Wifi. Somebody also complained about some parts, but those were running older kernels and AFAIK they didn't have support for newer Atheros wifi. Does anyone know anything about these machines?